- Two years ago, when we built our first most average
gaming PC, the GTX 1060...
(crowd gasping)
Stood alone as the most popular GPU for gamers.
But finally, all of that has changed.
- [Crowd] Praise the 1650!
- That's right, the great price raisening has taken its toll
and for the first time that I can remember,
the average gaming rig has actually gotten worse.
And since game developers are always going to target
the lowest common denominator
for their low graphics settings, does this mean
that game realism could actually take a step back?
To find, out we're gonna be building a new
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To make a proper comparison,
we started by reassembling our last unexceptional winner
and we reran all of our benchmarks.
Driver updates can make a big difference
over such a long period of time.
And then we pored over the latest Steam hardware survey,
along with the Amazon bestsellers, list to fill in the gaps
for items like power supply, case, and storage.
So without further ado, let's build it,
starting with our motherboard, the B660M-G from MSI.
And I know what you're thinking.
Really? A 12th gen chip?
Yes, actually, but I don't wanna talk about that yet.
We chose this board because the top selling V660
on Amazon right now is $110 gigabyte board
that we don't have, but we do have this similarly-priced guy
from MSI with pretty much the same features,
and no matter which one of them you end up with,
it's enough to make you question why anybody needs
a $500 motherboard.
It doesn't have some of the latest bells and whistles,
no support for front USB type C,
and it only has two memory slots,
which can make upgrading less economical,
but it's got two gen four M.2 slots,
support for two and a half gig LAN, and of course,
an upgrade path to the latest 13th gen CPUs.
With that out of the way, now we can talk about the CPU.
The problem with the Steam hardware survey
is that it doesn't report specific model numbers,
only the brand, average base clock frequency,
average core count, and an indicator
for how many people have hyperthreading or SMT.
On that note, 80% of you, by the way,
have hyperthreading now, meaning that two threads
per core is now overwhelmingly the norm.
The average core count has also gone up,
moving us from quad cores into the hexacore class.
But wait, the average base clock is now just 2.3
to 2.7 gigahertz?
I mean, even if Intel didn't still have two thirds
of the market, AMD's recent chips pretty much all
weigh in at around 3.6 gigahertz base.
Our suspicion is that this is due to a couple
of converging trends.
First of all, older CPUs that have low IPC
but extremely high clock speeds have really reached the end
of their useful gaming lifespan
and are likely being retired en masse.
The second is that we know that laptops
are a growing segment, particularly in gaming,
and they tend to have high boost clocks
but very low base clocks.
We were able to find some modern desktop chips
that closely fit the bill, though,
and we settled on the Core I5-12400.
Since it doesn't have any efficiency cores,
only performance cores, it should be fairly representative
of either a current gen Intel or AMD gaming experience,
and it also happens to be a great bang for the buck choice
at its last gen discounted price.
for CPU cooling, the Hyper 212 lineup of heat sinks
from Coolermaster must be mentioned
due to its obvious popularity.
However, some other great value options have hit the market
in recent years, so it's not really the clear choice
that it once was.
As for our build, well, our CPU comes with a stock cooler
and since it can't be overclocked due to restrictions
on the motherboard chipset and CPU,
we're gonna go ahead and use that,
which also makes our installation a little bit simpler.
Storage was a tough one.
I think I'm gonna fire an email over to Valve and ask them
if maybe in the future they can split it out by interface
so that we can see the share of NVMe versus SETA drives.
That could become a really important datapoint
down the road, depending on how direct storage plays out.
For now, though, the hardware survey doesn't give us much
in the way of granularity.
With only one terabyte plus for guidance, then,
we erred on the side of plus, given that so many
modern games will occupy 50 gigs or more of storage.
And we felt that with the popularity,
not to mention affordability, of M.2 NVMe drives,
it made sense to go for the not the best
but far from the worse Samsung 970 EVO Plus two terabyte.
If Amazon reviews are anything to go by,
you guys are on the same page here.
It's only PCie Express gen three, which might not be
as F-word as a gen four drive once direct storage
hits the scene for real, if it does,
but this thing has over 44,000 reviews
maintaining a solid five star rating.
And the best part is that if you don't need two terabytes
for $165, the one terabyte version is only 90 bucks.
That's incredibly affordable for this kind of performance,
though it is still over double
of what a retro polar fleece costs from lttstore.com,
and this is much less comfortable to wear.
Oh (beep)!
How cool is it that affordable motherboards are coming
with simple toolless SSD installation mechanisms now?
Love to see it.
Now, for memory...
Uh, it hasn't really changed.
Most of you are still rocking sixteen gigs, which is good,
but one thing did change.
We went with DDR4 rather than DDR3 this time around.
We settled on a middle of the road kit from Corsair,
a two by eight gig 3200 megatransfer per second CL16 kit.
All three top spots on Amazon are variants
of this Vengeance LPX kit with 72,000 reviews.
No RGB, just straight performance is what the people want,
so that's what we're gonna give them.
Moving on to the case...
What can I say?
This thing is still on top, despite the new variants
that massively improve on its performance.
At over 30,000 reviews, it eclipses every other case
in the top 10 list right now.
I mean, it's almost never the worst choice
to just pick what's popular, and the H510 is no exception.
It's got good looks, a user-friendly layout,
and it's fairly priced.
I just think that a savvier shopper would venture
just outside the box and maybe grab the Flow variant
in hopes that it will better handle future GPU upgrades
as we continue to march towards the industry goal
of creating gaming processors that double as space heaters.
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about
with quality of life features.
There's a little nubbin on the center motherboard standoff
that allows you to just rest the motherboard there.
I'm not saying I recommend doing this,
I'm just saying that, mm, you could.
By the way, the keen-eyed among you might have noticed
that I'm missing an IO shield.
Someone put this board back in inventory without it.
It doesn't affect performance but it could affect the amount
of EMI that's coming out of the back of the case.
Not that the sheeple shopping approach is always the best.
I'm about to contradict a lot of what I just said.
Please do not just buy the most reviewed
power supply on Amazon.
The Thermaltake Smart 500 watt will almost certainly
not immediately light on fire.
We actually included its little brother in our entry tier
holiday shopping guide, but we only did that
because we were trying to fit in a very aggressive budget.
We would never actually recommend
that you skimp on power supply,
so we're gonna put a couple of better options under
the video that don't cost much more.
For the purposes of this build, though, majority rules,
so we grabbed a close enough equivalent off our shelf,
complete with ketchup and mustard cables
and no 80 plus efficiency badge whatsoever.
Now let's talk about the big change, the GPU.
It costs anywhere from 170 all the way up to $250
for a 1650 brand new.
It wasn't very good when it launched
and it's not very good right now.
But with a new 3050, which would be the closest, you know,
current gen equivalent going for at least $300,
it's easy to see why, over the last few years especially
but even now, most people have opted for
the save a buck option and gone for one of these.
It's got only a 128 bit bus, four gigs of GDDR5 memory,
that is two gigs fewer than our 1060
from our last most average gaming PC,
and a boost clock speed of up to 1665 megahertz.
The problem with this card and the reason that I would not
recommend picking one up, even if you're budget constrained,
is that you can get a used 3050 for about the same price
off of eBay or Facebook Marketplace.
If you have one of these guys, though,
don't feel bad about it, 'cause I'm about to game on it
and I think our benchmark results might surprise you.
Or maybe it won't surprise you, since we already said
that game developers tend to target the hardware
that's out there, and a whopping 6% of gamers
are using this GPU.
Oh, moving on to what we're gonna connect it to,
we've got this, the Sceptre 24-inch 75 hertz.
Does it even have a model name?
The point is, it's not actually the most popular monitor,
this 21 and a half inch 1080p beast from Acer,
but it is the silver medalist
and both of them have the same core specs.
1080p resolution, a slightly higher than standard
75 hertz refresh rate, which makes a huge difference
over 60, by the way, and a very attractive price point.
On that note, the wired version of the G502 from Logitech
might seem like a bit of an odd choice on the most average
gaming PC, given that it's priced at $80,
but there's a method to this madness.
Nobody actually pays $80 for it.
It's currently $34 on sale,
which is a whole lot of bang for the buck,
and if the 50 plus thousand reviews are anything to go by,
it's almost always on sale.
Don't buy it for 80.
For keyboard, realistically, anything is probably fine.
Like, I would take a good mouse and a $6 keyboard
over the opposite eight days of the week,
so I grabbed this S101-3 from Red Dragon,
it's membrane, it's super popular,
and it'll get the job done.
If you just need a keyboard, though, this actually comes
as part of a keyboard mouse combo.
There are a lot of options out there around
this price point, or you could just see if
your aunt and uncle really need that one
that's sitting there collecting dust and just use that.
Almost complete absence of RGB, just as nature intended it.
The first thing you'll probably notice now that
we're fired up, other than that, hey, it worked,
is that despite us being able to install Windows 11,
we're still on Windows 10, just like 65% of you out there.
The top five games on Steam right now are CS:GO,
DotA 2, Lost Ark, Warzone 2, and PUBG.
Naturally, we benchmarked all of them, and honestly,
when you look at this, we've got 220, 230 FPSs in CS:GO.
All of them run pretty okay on either system,
but whether it's the fewer CPU cores
or the outdated DDR3 memory, our previous system
simply didn't keep up quite as well
in our two Battle Royale titles.
We noticed more hitching and our 1% lows were much, well,
lower, which results in a noticeably degraded experience,
particularly in intense firefights.
In DotA 2, we got about 150 FPSs,
with Lost Ark hovering around 60,
meaning that either of these systems, the most popular
from now or two years ago, is gonna be perfectly fine
with the most popular titles,
and we did all of our testing at very high details,
so if you want more FPS, you can just turn down the settings
and you should be good to go
for another year or two at least,
all for the reasonable price of $735,
which could fairly easily be cut down if you went for, like,
a secondhand case or something like that.
It's still a fair bit more than a console,
but it's also a fair bit more useful than a console,
since you can do so much more on PC,
like emulating older games, browsing the web,
chatting on Discord, et cetera.
But unlike a console, our computer isn't even
sort of 4K ready.
Halo Infinite defaulted to low, so obviously,
if we're gonna want strong frame rates,
we're going to have to expect to turn details down
a little bit, but whether it's Halo Infinite or
whether it's other AAA titles, at 1080p,
we found that everything was very playable
and with no odd bugs to speak of.
So if you target for your hardware what pretty much
everyone else is running, game studios are sure
to at least consider your system
as they develop their upcoming titles.
The bar does look like it's about to jump up, by the way,
with the RTX 3060 gunning for the top spot,
but that's another story for another day,
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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out
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Oh yeah.